


Eldritch Throes

by HattaLee



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Body horror tw, Gen, Generally dark, Rose is alienated, self harm tw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-02
Updated: 2014-08-02
Packaged: 2018-02-11 10:32:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2064729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HattaLee/pseuds/HattaLee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>... they are stubborn throes. Rose looks strange, acts strange, and so they don't talk about Rose Lalonde. But that doesn't stop the horrorterrors from trying to claim their seer, and putting her through hell in the process.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eldritch Throes

 They don't talk about Rose Lalonde.

She sits at the back of the room in every class, she knows the answer to every question but never says them out loud. No one has ever seen her hand in an assignment late. She's quiet, ominously so, and the strangeness is enough to enforce the idea conjured by her lilac eyes that she is dangerous. So the kids don't talk to her. Her golden head stays down in the hallways and there's a few whispers, maybe, but that's all she gets. And she's used to this. It's easier to talk behind a computer screen, to be outgoing and herself when no one can see the strange paleness that is her body. The kids around her don't understand, labelled her as a ghost in kindergarten and never really forgot the lingering sense of otherness it created. And she certainly hasn't. She feels it every day, walking through the halls as a single point of white among the colours of her peers.

There is a teacher, Mr. Scratch, who is almost as colourless as she is. But he is old, and a teacher, and an adult, and the children cannot push him because he'll push back. Every so often she will catch him watching her, while she's copying notes down on the human brain. When he watched her a shiver crawls down her spine, because he is somehow so like her but so different. He has lived a lifetime with what she is, and she doubts if she will ever get the opportunity.

She comes home to either an empty house or a drunk mother. It doesn't matter which one it is night to night, either way she's without supervision. The deep red of wine sloshes against a glass or else her footsteps ring out through too many empty rooms. Her mother rarely tries to speak to her. So she goes into her room and disappears into stories about wizards and magic and far far away but mostly the monsters, the wonderful Lovecraftian creations that capture her imagination. Her computer will chirp occasionally, announcing the presence of people who don't know that they should be alienating her. But she'd been told her whole life that she is different, wrong. One night, as she lies awake exchanging messages and purple and blue texts, she feels alone. Because as kind as John is, he doesn't know her. And suddenly her room is far too large for her small body and the entire house has too much room, the whole world is too big and won't let anyone near her. She begins to understand why her mother chooses not to face reality.

It's one of the mornings her mother is too hungover to protest when she stays home with a queasy stomach and a throbbing head. Sunlight filters into the room and she hates it, wished it would stay the inky blackness of night for the rest of time. In her dreams the pain lessens, and when she again wakes she's able to do something with her day. So she reads, garbage can pulled tight beside her bed just in case. The sound of her mother retching in the other room isn't doing much by way of helping her own stomach. The blankets are pulled around her shoulders and she burrows backwards, swept up in tales of wizards who could cure her illness in seconds. She wishes she was one of them.

Halfway through her body has finished fighting, and the loud snores of her mother assure her it's her own time to be sick. She runs to the now vacated bathroom and retches into the toilet, her cropped hair not getting in the way as much as it could have. Hated, violet eyes squeeze shut for fear that they'll pop out of her head and when she opens them again the toilet is filled with black sludge. Jerking her head up reveals a dribble of the stuff coming from the corner of her mouth, thick and a colour almost deeper than the void she'd longed for that morning. A breath catches in her throat and she doesn't know what it is, doesn't know what happened to her body. She wipes it away from her face and sends it swirling down the pipes, standing until every trace is gone. And she can almost pretend she imagined it, that it was a fever dream. She bolts back into bed and pulls the cover over her head, her body tired enough that she falls asleep quickly.

A few months later her birthday comes with the snow. Her mother is continuing the passive-aggressive show of affection by leaving her a book-shaped present wrapped in gaudy hot pink paper. She leaves a sickeningly heartfelt note on her mother's dresser in return. The _Grimoire for Summoning the Zoologically Dubious_ is a massive tome and she devours it in a day, drinking in the information and memorizing it over the course of the month. She dreams of them, the outer gods, the horrorterrors. She dreams of floating in an endless void surrounded by them, hears them hissing out her name in a language she doesn't understand. And it isn't unpleasant, the dreams. They were as grotesque as her, wrong and banished to the fringes of their worlds just like she was.

Her mother knows she can't out do herself for Christmas now, but tries anyways. There is an impressive number of presents under the tree, but Rose didn't want any of them. They were obvious in their wrappings. A new violin, a new laptop, makeup her mother must assume any teenage girl would like. She got her mother something wrought with sentimentality the elder Lalonde would cherish because she was supposed to. As per tradition, they have a grand tree cut down and set up in their living room. And Rose would put the star on top, before mother and daughter would light it up and pretend they were a normal family. She is standing atop a chair, poised carefully with the star in her hands, when she falls backwards and brings a few red baubles down with her. When she hits the ground the ornaments break with her, and the hand she splays out catches on one of them. A thick line of red gushes up, desperate to reach the air.

Her mother grabs her hand in alarm but she smiles wide and puts in behind her back, not even looking at it properly. The blood dripping onto the floor is enough. She insists it's nothing and makes excuses until she's allowed to leave to patch it up. As soon as the word is given she's gone, trying to minimize the blood trail she'll no doubt leave. It was a deep cut, she knows, because she saw at least how far the shard was stuck into her hand. Having made the escape back to her room she moves to the bathroom, turning on the cold water and finally bringing out her hand. There is nothing but a few smears of blood, the long gash somehow healed. In its place is a line of gently raised circles, wrapping lovingly around where the wound had been. She wraps gauze gently around it anyways, because she can't give her mother answers she doesn't have.

She sleeps more fitfully, and even though she dreams she's sure she never gets enough sleep. In her dreams, she cannot see. Around her stretches eternal, impossible blackness. The air is so thick she thinks it might not even be air at all. And in the darkness are shapes, great hulking things that move fluidly but without grace. She grows scared of the things in her dreams, and sleeps with a small light shaped like the sun beside her bed. The rays stretching out from the centre do nothing to penetrate her dreams. The warm orange glow can't reach the place she goes.

At school, she can't concentrate. Her first day back is slow, as it usually is after a break, but her mind is working even slower. Instead of taking notes she is scribbling wavy lines in the margins of her notebook paper. Soon the lines become too tangled in the confines of the paper's edge and travel outwards, capturing words and letters in their tendrils. The lines become tentacles of some deep-dwelling creature, and ever page she writes that day is filled with some variation of the pattern. Mr. Scratch notices her distraction, because he always notices her. And for once he actually goes up to her, and Rose is asked if she is all right. She lies and tells him that of course she is, because Rose is good at lying. And he leaves it there, because she walks away. But her mind is still elsewhere, somewhere far beyond human comprehension. The fact that she knows it makes her think that maybe she isn't human.

A week later and the girl who sits beside Rose in English class says hello as she takes her seat. Rose looks away and responds with what was supposed to be a quiet hello but comes out as a jumbled “Nyurb gu'ilg”. The other girl is startled, and Rose watches her do a double take. She isn't sure herself what happened. The girl shakes her head and resumes whatever conversation the rest of the class is having. In her mind, it's just Rose Lalonde, and they don't talk to Rose Lalonde. She'd obviously found the reason. Rose was too busy searching her own head for the strange words that had sat so pleasantly on her tongue.

She's throwing up sludge again. It comes every night now, the unnamed substance her body is creating in preparation for something. Her stomach can't hold it, after a while can't hold anything much at all. If anyone notices how little she eats, how dull her eyes become, they don't say a word. Sometimes her throat gets a break and it's just water, which moves smoothly through her throat.

Others the already raw skin would get washed in salt water and she'd cry and cry and curl up in a ball on the bathroom floor until her mother came in, needing to do the same. Her excuses are drinking, or heat stroke, or a stomach flu. Her mother begins to notice and she doesn't care.

Rose knows that at some point she'd become horribly deformed, that this can't keep happening and leave her anything close to normal. The surreality of the things leaving her body get to her, and she begins to doubt what is real. She begins to doubt she is human. To prove it to herself she bites a razor across her skin, feeling the sharp pain break through the constant dull ache and finally she is free, because she has control. And then she wakes up in the morning to gently sucker marks along her arms and she screams her already raw throat horse because she can't even have that, she can't even have scars. She can't even hurt like the human being she only barley believed herself to be.

She takes notes in a gibberish language with too many apostrophes and she can understand it perfectly well. A classmate asks to borrow them and she just about has a heart attack, and for a split second she flounders because how does she explain, what explanation is there? Instead she snaps at him that he should have brought his own. Her hands shake as she shoves the tentacle-filled pages into her bag, out of sight, and almost cringes at the hurt look he shoots her. But she has a secret to keep, now. No one can know that she's slowly going crazy. Instead of taking the bus she runs home, pounds her feet across the pavement and feels like she's going to fly away with each step. She doesn't answer questions in class anymore, not since she'd answered, “Gorthytch svulk borbly'ahth,” to her math teacher's question. There were snickers of laughter at that and Rose felt the need to keep her mouth clamped permanently shut, lest the strangeness seep out of her. Lest it infect the air around her, leave the black sludge in gaseous form floating around her in a constant black cloud. She doesn't need another visual clue of her otherness, although the ever increasing marks on her arms are beginning to be too obvious.

The dreams are coming more and more frequently, soothing her burning throat with their coldness. She would drown, and the tentacles would try and help her breath by shoving salt water down her throat. But each time they kill her faster instead, frantically ending her life in an attempt to save her. Once she makes it to something like a sea floor and they push her face into the sand, thinking she is some strange creature who needs the small grains instead. She wakes up and heaves tiny seashells and coral, particles of sand dotting the black sludge her body is trying so hard to expel. It feels like there's an infinite supply, that for every ounce she gets rid of two more are poured down her throat. She misses

school and her grades slip but she doesn't care because she just wants to curl up and die, to end the endless stream of nightmarish material coming from her increasingly weak body.

She panics one night when she's reading in the dim lighting of the moon and her skin looks grey. It's only a split second, but she sees herself wrapped in twisting tendrils of black rising off her grey skin and she screams, screams until she screams herself hoarse and she has to go and throw up black sludge again because of the effort she's taking to expel whatever it is from her body. She forces it out of her body, sticking a toothbrush down her throat and forcing everything she can to get out, and she screams and cries because she can't do this anymore. There’s a streak of crimson sliding down the ceramic toilet bowl this time, but it goes unnoticed. She's too busy shaking herself to sleep on the cold tiled floor.

It feels like they've violated her trust when they pick her up. She can't breath again and the tentacles push and grab and pull her, carrying her along, and she screams but the echo of her screaming earlier remains and it hurts too much so she stops, giving up and letting them carry her. She wakes up in her own bed, not where she fell asleep, and she cries when she sees the sucker marks encircling her stomach. She cries and then she stands up, going through the morning ritual of heaving up black sludge and trying to make herself look as it she'd gotten some semblance of sleep. Her skin is paler than ever. She's started wearing black lipstick to cover up the way her lips are getting stained darker and darker every day, and it glides on effortlessly at this point. The kids snicker about her being a goth and she thinks Mr. Scratch is about to call her mother about it. She doesn't care. She has no other option.

Rose has gotten tired. So, so tired. She can feel the tentacles pressing into her eyes and ears and mouth and she's started throwing them up too, leaking every dirty thing in her body in the toilet and sometimes not even making it that far. She stops showing up at school and by now no one notices, her mother's gone for god knows how long and Rose is about to give up. They whisper to her in her dreams, coaxing her, feeding her a twisted form of affection she'd never had. And it feels good, somehow, it feels good to slip away. She's throwing up nothing but blood and her eyes are rolling back in her head and she thinks it looks kind of cool, how pale her face is against the stark white of her eyes. And then she realizes she can see without her eyes and the black sludge comes back, and she never leaves the bathroom because she can't.

She isn't thinking in English, isn't forming thought in a language she can name. There is only the foreign, impossible tongue the horrorterrors whisper and she can understand it, she can hear them and they're telling her to come and play.

They don't talk about Rose Lalonde because she disappeared, she walked straight out of her house down to the nearest river and drowned herself. Her feet were like lead as she walked to the bottom, where they told her mother they'd never find her body. But her body was being claimed somewhere out in space, in the endless nothingness of the outer ring where the gods were moulding the broken and shattered girl. They turned her eyes white and her skin grey, and she took their void with her in black steaming tendrils. She became their vessel, their messenger, and her life was given over to the elder gods.

And in the small town she used to live in, they still don't talk about Rose Lalonde.

  


**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Water Beckons Her](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4078246) by [orphan_account](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account)




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